show me your teeth
i have the worst / most over the top root canal story ever.
it was an emergency situation as a result of a tooth basically exploding at the root while i was in the mountains outside osaka, japan. the pain was so bad and unpredictable, i thought my jaw was broken. the altitude of the mountain, as well as the flight back, made it worse. when i landed in san diego, my mom (a retired dentist) knew immediately what the problem was and got me to an endodontist straight from the airport. having finally arrived at treatment, the doctor informed me that i was too swollen and damaged for the drugs to work.
so he drilled into my tooth without novocane, filing down the sides so the tooth is now a stump. he paused for a moment, as a service, to explain to me (in his william h macy fargo voice) the circumstance my tooth is in. tapping the surrounding teeth with his metal tool he says, “see, these feel normal,” and then taps the fucked one, “and this is likely extremely painful”. it was!
he then began pulling dead root nerve out of the hole in my now volcano-shaped molar. as he’s pulling out bits, he keeps putting them up to his nose to smell. the stuff they get out of you during a root canal is the most rancid smell you could imagine. he puts it to my nose at one point to make sure i get it. “absolutely rotten!” i gag at the smell, and he’s seriously rolling his eyes back into his head with each whiff, as if he was on the verge of eating the pieces or doing a line of them. it was fucking weird. i’m laughing and crying at this time because of the absurdity and just how much pain i was in, without drugs. peter gabriel’s sledgehammer is blaring over the office speaker. they are asking me questions about japan and i am just hysterical.
when i’m done, they prescribe no painkillers - i’m just to have ibu or advil with my antibiotics. i take a handful and get into a limo to go see def leppard and styx with a handful of san diego chargers football players, still in the clothes i wore on the flight from japan.
absurd.
above: drunk but still in pain at the end of the day. 2008.
